John Charles Ryan is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Perth. He is the author of the books Green Sense (TrueHeart Press, 2012), Two With Nature (Fremantle Press, 2012, with Ellen Hickman), Unbraided Lines (CG Publishers, 2013), Digital Arts (Bloomsbury, 2014, with Cat Hope) and Being With (CG Publishers, 2014). He is the co-editor of several forthcoming collections in the field of critical plant studies, including The Language of Plants (2016) and Green Thread (Lexington Books, 2016), with Patrícia Vieira and Monica Gagliano. His interests include the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, ecocultural studies, ecopoetics, plant studies, and practice-led research. His project FloraCultures is a digital archive of plant-based cultural heritage (www.floracultures.org.au).

Abstract

Plant life is an integral part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional writings. Percipient trees, exemplified by Old Man Willow, possess the capacity to vocalise and approximate human speech, whereas herbaceous plants tend to be silent and aromatic. While Tolkien attributes qualities of consciousness and memory to sonic trees, he denies similar intelligent qualities to herbs, such as athelas or kingsfoil. This paper will compare the sonic trees and perfumed herbs of Middle-earth through the framework of emerging science in plant bioacoustics and behaviour. A distinction will be made between the extrinsic and intrinsic capacities of plants in the legendarium. Tolkien’s arborescent ethics privileges trees, endowing them with vocalisation, while constructing healing plants in terms of their use value and associating the sense of smell with a non-sentient flora.